Disney Research creates tactile touchscreen by shocking your fingers

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Touchscreens have done wonders making content and user interfaces more interactive, but there’s something missing. A touchscreen still just feels like a slab of glass, but your fingertips are jampacked with nerve endings. It seems like a bit of a waste, doesn’t it? Disney seems to think so, and it’s developing a new kind of electro-vibration technology to make touchscreens more tactile.

There have been a few demos of touch surfaces that actually change shape in some small way, but that’s not an ideal approach as it distorts the image and requires moving parts. Disney’s idea, as detailed in a recent paper, is to use electrical voltage to change the friction the user perceives in different areas of the screen — it’s essentially haptic feedback. The effect of sliding one’s finger across such a surface is that of 3D ridges, edges, and slopes.

The system is controlled by an algorithm developed specifically for this screen technology. The device calculates the gradient of the virtual surface and analyzes the velocity of the touch input (probably a finger) sliding across it. These variables are used to determine the necessary voltage to increase the friction, thus giving the illusion of 3D structures.

This same algorithm can be used to model complicated objects as well as simple ones, but getting the depth of field data is still a bit tricky. A Microsoft Kinect could be used to gather the necessary data from a real world object, or a 3D model file with the depth dimensions could be used instead. Topographical maps that already contain elevation data could also be plugged into the Disney tactile screen.

This technology is still in the lab, but Disney has the resources to keep working on it until the price comes down. Maybe in the future you’ll be able to navigate your phone’s UI entirely by touch, courtesy of Disney.